Quotes About Expression

No one has the right to enter literature without fresh new ideas. We've got too many dexterous drudges as it is.

To be an artist it is not necessary to make a living from our creations. Nor is it necessary to have work hanging in fine museums or the praise of critics. To be an artist it is necessary to live with our eyes wide open, to breath in the colors of mountain and sky, to know the sound of leaves rustling, the smell of snow, the texture of bark. To be an artist is to notice every beautiful and tragic thing, to cry freely, to collect experience and shape it into forms that others can share.

There are a lot of things we don't have in life, but time is not one of them. Time is all we have. One lifetime under this name, to produce a body of work that says, "This is how I saw the world." Your work is worthy of whatever time it takes.

Art is free," he said, "and is not to be diminished by any chains of craftsmanship.

ONE CRITICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT WAS THAT ART escaped from religion and into the larger world.

You're implying that Gertie is too old to be having fun, and that's wrong. If Gertie wants to dress like a hooker and ride an alligator float down the bayou when she's a hundred and two, she should do it.

Action indeed is the sole medium of expression for ethics.

Man must work, she might well have said, and woman must not weep.

"Only a novel"… in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humor are conveyed to the world in the best chosen language.

I opened my mouth to do some calm explaining. "I'm gay." is what came out.

You were mean and worried then and you're mean and worried now. The expression on your face hasn't changed one bit. It's a dangerous man who reacts more or less in the same way to good news or bad news.

But short films are not inferior, just different. I think the short gives a freedom to film-makers. What's appealing is that you don't have as much responsibility for storytelling and plot. They can be more like a portrait, or a poem.

I didn't like England. I couldn't take the look of the place or the style of friendship. I need more intimacy from people than is considered okay there, and I felt that my personality and my enthusiasms weren't understood. I had to put a big lid on myself.

But I think it's quite clear in my work that my orientation isn't political or doesn't come out of modern politics.

I really think that writing about sex is writing about the mind.

The ritual dance was a dromenon, a thing to be done, not a thing to be looked at.

The idle mind, which demands rules, i.e. recipes for making correct sentences, and shirks the subtler task of understanding the speaker's point of view and living into his emotion will never either use or understand aspects aright. If the speaker is living into the action, sympathizing with it, he will use imperfective, if he stands outside and merely states a fact or a judgment he will instinctively use the perfective

To read is to empower, To empower is to write, To write is to influence, To influence is to change, To change is to live".

I am still baffled by those who feel that criticizing America is unpatriotic, a view increasingly being adopted in the United States since 9/11 as an excuse to render suspect what has always been an American right. An active, brave, outspoken (and heard ) citizenry is essential to a healthy democracy.

On the whole I think poems don't crawl out of dreams. They are knocked out of rocks.

Her mother was fine. Her mother was always fine. Fine was her way of saying she didn't exist.

I heard the phrases and I wanted all of me to call out in a song, a song that doesn't have words, a song that almost doesn't have noise. A lot of people take a short cut and call that feeling of song love. They just call it that because there isn't a way to describe it. But the word love doesn't describe the half of it. It doesn't do anything to bring to mind the song we all want so desperately to sing.

A skull graces the bulging muscle of one large bicep, a rose with something stuck in it is along another arm, a spider crawls along his back, and other intricately woven lines join them all together. These tattoos mean something.

From my hand,